Feedback for the updated Strava feed

We are excited to share with you a project that we've been working on for the past year - a new way to experience the Strava feed.

The feedback you've been sharing with us about better ways to sort and filter the feed has not gone unnoticed. The feed fuels the power of our community and is where athletes inspire and interact with each other. We discovered that on average Strava athletes miss almost 60% of the content in their feed every day. Strava's new feed presents a non-chronological ordering of activities based on characteristics we think are most valuable to you.

Here's how it works:

When you refresh your feed, any content you haven't seen before will be at the top of the feed, above activities you've already seen. The order in which these new items appear is based on a learning algorithm that uses your past behavior to gauge whether you'll find content interesting. Comment a lot on your sister's activities? Her items will be ranked highly for you. Your friend just ran their best time for a 10K? That will get promoted as well. The algorithm will continue to evolve over time, learning as you use it. We won't hide any activities from you - they'll all be in your feed, just in a different order designed to ensure you don't miss the items that matter most to you. You can read more on our blog.

We will be slowly releasing the new feed over the coming weeks, along with close monitoring of performance and your feedback. You are welcome to add to the discussion below or contact us directly by submitting a ticket.

I did submit a support ticket a few weeks ago. It took a while to get a response and when I finally did, they just said:

"Thanks for giving the new Strava feed a try.

We will be slowly releasing updates and changes to the feed over the coming weeks, along with close monitoring of performance and your feedback. You are welcome to let us know what you think by posting a comment in our community."

Based on the fact that I don't check Strava often, it definitely confuses me to have things out of order. Especially when I'm looking for a ride I know a friend did that Strava has decided should be lower. Preference-based order make sense when time isn't as relevant, or there's a lot more noise (I'm looking at you facebook) but for something like this the order matters to me. For example: I like to see who else has decided to commute in the mornings - these often times get buried.

Chronological feed is what we want. We don't want you selecting what your bots think we want. My triathlete buddies and I have multiple run/rides/swims in both one race and one training day. The new feed is like throwing all that into the wind and having mixed up (if you can find it at all) I quit using Facebook on a regular basis because they did this exact same thing. Bring back chronological order as a default

To be honest I would expect some kind of statement from Strava. Compared to facebook a lot of people do pay for the service and the new feed is annoying. I guess I did not see one comment praising it.

In the IT world you have to understand what customer focus is and respect their feedback especially when dealing with consumers. Never think you are big enough that there will be no alternatives. Much bigger companies have died because of stuff like that.

It is somewhat amazing that there has been no statement at all from Strava. I am a premium member because I want to support Strava, not because of the features that I don't actually need or use (as a runner!). It seems a bit unbelieveable that they are ignoring their customers. Maybe they have too few of us supporting them and just feel the need to monetize the network. It's a shame. I've started looking up my friends on GarminConnect and have also removed 50+ people I was following to simplify my feed in response to Strava messing it up with this new non-chronological feed.

I am also a fan of chronological order. I do understand that some folks may like to have it the way you are excited to release for us but I am old fashioned. It gets too messy when you do it your way and I miss rides from friends. Please allow us an option to keep the old chronological order instead of the new way. Thanks.

Add me to the list of people that have cancelled their premium Strava accounts. I will not pay the wages of those who make these narrow minded decisions. You have had more than enough time to give us an option to choose for ourselves and right this wrong. Clearly you are not listening to the comments here...Enough is enough! Adios!

This "feature" is completely and utterly frustrating. I don't care about the sixteen commutes my friends did a week ago. I care about seeing the rides that happened today. The "you might be interested in" order is bafflingly useless. Make it chronological again or at least give us the option.

I would prefer it if we could filter out the joining and earning of challenges, and those rides that are commutes. This is all just noise that from what I can tell few are interested in. Conversely have an option to favourite your friends. Perhaps have them colour coded into groups, family, charities, clubs etc

Strava has become like facebook now and I dont bother to read or scroll. Too much crap. I use strava now as a personal cycling business card holder, much like facebook. I also use training peaks to record data so Strava is rapidly losing its appeal.

This is so frustrating. I used to enjoy looking through my Strava feed. No more - I find I'm checking it far less now. Please just turn this stupid algorithm off !

Also while I'm on my soapbox stop filling my feed with Atheletes I might like to follow. Every day the same profiles are rammed in my feed. I was capable of loading the app myself so I'm capable of finding & following athletes on my own to.

"We are monitoring your comments and will regroup to see how this feature is doing before we proceed"

I won't pay money for this garbage anymore. For the many reasons mentioned by the hundreds of people above, I won't be renewing my premium membership unless Strava puts a chronological option in the settings. And, while you're at it Strava, as has been mentioned before (i) I don't need recommendations on who to follow. I'm perfectly capable of picking who I want to follow. Just because I happen to give kudos to someone I rode with does not mean I want to follow them. (ii) give me the option to not to show Zwift trainer rides. Zwift is awesome, but don't confuse it with riding.

You are the one with access to all the metrics and can determine if your new direction was a good business decision, but really, it will take much less data processing power to simply put things in chronological order, and it would be so easy not to alienate your core users.

We've been following the comments posted here as we continue to work on the new feed. In order to gather a bit more information, we've also designed a survey that you are welcome to take to help our engineers understand how the new feed is or isn't working for you. Thanks for your participation: https://goo.gl/forms/QRDKxi7rmoz95pa43

There's massive negative feedback here. Why do you need more information and a survey? Note also that the last question of the survey is ambiguous: "How much does this change impact your overall satisfaction of using Strava?". Answers range from "no impact" to "high impact", but there's no way of indicating whether it's highly negative impact, or highly positive impact! Your PR folks will probably take the results and claim that a majority thought that the new feed has has a highly positive impact - but this is not the case!

Like many, I'm giving up and won't be renewing my premium subscription. I've joined the following club, which today has 421 members:

Strava, I want a chronological feed

Hundreds of posts from users saying they hate the change, and asking for the ability to sort the feed chronologically, and you need more information on how the new feed isn't working for us? Seriously?